First, perhaps, it's a name that can't be recalled, car keys that can't be found. Then larger things disappear -- the ability to do a crossword, make coffee, find your way home. And then finally it's the personality itself that's submerged, memories of loved ones, nicknames and affections.

Bit by bit, grain by grain, Alzheimer's buries it all.

Navigate all the dangers of old age -- cancer and heart attacks and strokes -- and you may find it still cruelly waiting around a corner. It waits for Fiona, in the new Canadian film "Away From Her." And then it pounces.

Still lovely and luminous in her 60s, she has weathered it all, including her husband's serial infidelities. She has survived, and so has her marriage, and now comes the good time, the years of lazy travel and leisurely conversations and long evenings in front of the fire with no work tomorrow to worry about.

And then her husband, Grant, finds her putting the frying pan away in the freezer. Staring at a bottle of wine, and unable to pronounce the word. Walking into their backyard and wandering off, only to be found hours later, standing on a bridge, hesitantly smiling and absolutely lost.

And so the long farewell begins.

"Away From Her" is based on a short story by Alice Munro, and it is both an unusual and totally expected feature debut by actress Sarah Polley. Unusual because downbeat romances starring 60-something characters are not the sort of thing young filmmakers are usually drawn to. Expected because Polley -- whose credits include "The Sweet Hereafter" and "My Life Without Me" -- has always been an intelligent and independent soul.

She is still a young filmmaker, though, and while she's smart to choose a short story to adapt -- a form that's far more suited to film than the novel -- she labors over it a bit too much. In Munro's original story, for example, the story progressed in a straightforward, linear fashion; Polley's script includes both momentary flashbacks and extended flash-forwards, and interrupts the flow of the actors' performances.

Nonetheless, there are fine performances here. Gordon Pinsent, a veteran Canadian actor, is Grant, the husband watching his wife slip away; Olympia Dukakis is Marian, a wife watching her husband slowly disappear as well. They both do fine, careful work (although Polley's decision to go beyond Munro's story, and have them actually begin a romance, is a small but crucial mistake).

Even better is the marvelous Julie Christie, the "Darling" of '60s cinema, now 66 and alternately bewildered, frightened and finally accepting. "I think all we can aspire to in this situation is a little bit of grace," she counsels her husband early on, and Christie achieves that with elegant ease; if her Fiona chooses to go gently into that good night, it is not from cowardice but courage.

As a director, Polley could use a little bit of that woman's bravery, or at least her patience. She overloads the movie with music, as if she's unsure of her own skills to evoke emotion; she rushes along plot points (Fiona's degeneration, Grant's affair) as if she's uncertain of our own interest. A more confident director would be willing to wait, and risk taking the time to let things develop.

With luck, those skills will develop in Polley, and we'll have the opportunity to watch them. For now, though, we have Christie to look at. And the heartbreaking slow-motion tragedy of a vibrant woman being buried alive under the shifting sands -- memory by memory, word by word, grain by grain.